…are we real?

Navigation

Tag Archives: language

Post navigation

The second day of the workshop has once again proved to be quite interesting and hands on where we have had the opportunity to brainstorm and explore ideas – the key terms here seem to have been – get wild, get creative! We have had the opportunity to come up with our own questions and provide answers (quantity more than quality applied here!) in the most creative, yet time efficient way as possible. Here is a short summary, from our group that was only made up of 2 people 🙂 myself and Antoinette – but we fared fairly well I would say.

Hard at work! Workshop participants…

However the vibe around the room was quite exceptional – fun and dynamic would pretty much sum up the session. Thinking about what connected passion, engagement, learning and technology, we emerged with a question that asked ‘How might we lead people to the frame of mind that can connect learning to the technology?’ We came up with 20 possibilities that could somehow direct us to the question, the most popular of which turned out to be get learners into teachers and teachers into learners (swap roles). This was closely followed by creating authentic settings, and involving students, teachers and parents in a Wiki project.

Write your thoughts moment – our 20 thoughts moment!

In the end our rapid prototyping project turned out to combine all these three elements by proposing a national public Wiki project, that would be themed around the various forms of literacies and that would allow parents, teachers and students to collaborate using one single platform. This ‘social project’ would help people connect the dots between learning and technology, using a medium everyone is familiar with… sounds fun isn’t it? Doable? Well we think it’s not impossible – however it’s not without its challenges. Once more kudos to @peterford for making us think, do and collaborate in a fun and engaging way!

Peter Ford started off by telling us that “It’s not about changing people’s thinking but about changing people’s actions”. In re-imagining teachers as designers we have to understand that teachers can be creators as much as consumers of knowledge. The video below describes in brief some ideas of teachers and the creativity process:

Peter Ford challenged us first with the question: What makes great teaching?

Possible contenders as answers to this question could be: Content Knowledge? Quality of Instruction? Classroom Climate?such as the quality of interactions within a climate that values each student? And in all of these one asks where is the technology? What position does it occupy in this list of contenders? It might possibly be that rather than measuriing how technology impacts outcomes (such as assessment grades), we could measure how technology impacts teaching and learning (for example how feedback is given).

Technology needs to become an embedded practice in everyday teaching and learning and not running parallel to it. n relation to this Peter Ford made reference to Dylan Wiliam, a professional who has done extensive work on formative assessments, who goes on to say that “teachers don’t lack knowledge. What they lack is support in working out how to integrate their ideas into their daily practice – and this takes time, which is why we have to allow teachers to take small steps”. So small steps seems to be a key term in today’s workshop – slowly but surely, as my colleague, here at the workshop so rightly put it 🙂